Trisha Brown delights anew

Allan Ulrich, EXAMINER DANCE CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, March 11, 2000

BERKELEY - It begins with a dancer swimming through the air framed by a

cut-out of a giant moon. It is a promise of wonders to come, and Trisha Brown's "Canto/Pianto," in its West Coast premiere Friday evening at UC-Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, keeps its word. Austere and lustrous, the work marks a decisive step in the evolution of this leading American postmodernist.

And this weekend's Cal Performances engagement marks the Trisha Brown Dance Company's return to the Bay Area after a four-year absence. An exhilarating new work, "Five Part Weather Invention" (1999), seals this choreographer's reputation as leader of the pack. A revival of that still-engaging, 1983 multimedia classic, "Set and Reset," proves as potent and mysterious as ever. The program, repeated for the last time Saturday, features a mostly newish 10-member company that seems capable of competing with Brown's fabled dancers of past visits. That Brown herself is not performing this weekend is the only drawback.

Nothing dates as quickly as yesterday's avant-garde. Brown, who received her formal dance training at Oakland's Mills College, has been fashioning works with her own company for the past 30 years. The current era seems to represent a period of consolidation.

While at one time, she shocked members of the Judson Church generation by scaling walls, she has integrated that flirtation with gravity into "Canto/Pianto." At the start, Katrina Thompson sails, somersaults and pedals through the ether in a manner that bespeaks a genuine choreo

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graphic impulse, a corollary to Brown's "equipment pieces." One can only hope that the local practitioners of aerial work, which rarely rises above the level of prosaic circus routines, can attend Saturday's performance and consider the possibilities.

In recent years, also, Brown has started to use conventional music for her dances, or, more precisely, to construct those works with respect to the formal strictures and emotional import of those scores. "M.O.," set to Bach's "A Musical Offering," and seen at Yerba Buena Center during the previous visit, was the first piece in what Brown refers to as a "cycle" of creative endeavor.

"Canto/Pianto" wasn't originally supposed to happen. In 1998, Brown directed and choreographed for Brussels' La Monnaie a version of Claudio Monteverdi's seminal 1607 operatic masterwork, "L'Orfeo," which was later imported to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Originally, the plan was for Cal Performances to revive that production for this June's Berkeley Festival and Exhibition. But that date would have conflicted with the schedule of conductor Ren Jacobs, whose participation Brown felt was integral to the project.

"Canto/Pianto" condenses the complete opera into a series of movement episodes that parallel the events of the narrative. Jacobs, his orchestra Concerto Vocale and a group of stylish and unnamed singers are now heard on tape.

"L'Orfeo," in its entirety, will be revived in 2002 and UC-Berkeley has not ruled out a booking. Yet, "Canto/Pianto," which the Brown company has been touring in this country and abroad for

much of the past year, is a stand-alone effort, revealing its own movement logic, even without much decor beyond Jennifer Tipton's lighting, James Dawson's grinding and whirring sound effects, Burt Barr's costumes and the dresses by Suzanne Gallo, who passed away earlier this year.

After the airborne Prologue, Brown offers the wittiest kind of contrast, dancers in unison on the floor shimmying like an enormous reticulated snake (the one that bites the heroine). The choreographer, in turn, recounts the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, the death of Eurydice, the journey to the underworld, the ascent, the second demise of Eurydice and Orpheus' tragic destruction by the Bacchae.

Remarkably, Brown's formalized groups and solo forays mirror the form of the music, the flexible recitatives (essentially, enhanced speech) that were Monteverdi's legacy to the operatic tradition. The dancers, in streamlined black and gray garb, frequently line up and a few performers emerge from this "chorus" to suggest plot details without descending into mundane exposition.

If the operatic form seems archaic to some, the translation to dance adds another dimension. In the Prologue for example, Thompson floats into the range of vision with the same routine whenever we hear the instrumental ritornello that punctuates the episode. The finale, as Orpheus (Todd Stone) is torn apart for his disdain of worldly pleasures, is about as literal as Brown ever gets. Here's one vote for importing "L'Orfeo" in toto.

"Five Part Weather Invention," also a West Coast premiere, follows "Canto/Pianto" with only

the briefest pause and with a burst of color that seems positively hedonistic after the rigors of the Monteverdi. Brown here is experimenting with the looser-limbed improvisatory feeling of jazz. The score, by David Douglas, features (on tape) the composer on trumpet, double bassist Greg Cohen, accordionist Guy Klucevsek and violinist Mark Feldman - a group that calls itself Charms of the Night Sky.

Tipton illuminates Terry Winters' backdrop of enigmatic squiggles, topped by a series of color bars that complement the hues of the dancers' costumes. In this brainy romp, the playfulness of the choreography, the toying with unisons and odd accumulations of phrases, is beguiling. As one dancer falls to floor in a unison passage, the audience gasps. When the next performer slips to the stage, the audience chuckles. What looks spontaneous, Brown suggests, may very well be premeditated.

"Set and Reset" is famous for Robert Rauschenberg's decor, film loops projected on two pyramids and a box, for the newsprint costumes and for Laurie Anderson's score. What endures, however, is Brown's restricted vocabulary - swinging arms, sudden transitions, luxuriant kneebends and phrasing dynamics that convey an exhilarating theatrical sensibility. Those qualities have not dated at all.